Adapt-a-lift/Hyster

Overview:
Adaptalift Hyster Forklift Rentals & Sales (ALL Hyster) was founded 30 years ago and since then has grown to become the largest privately owned forklift company in Australia. AAL Hyster has a national network of sales offices and service centres located in all metropolitan and major regional centres to cater for the total forklift fleet around Australia are reportedly in excess of 10,500 . As the name suggests AAL Hyster incorporates Adaptalift and Hyster which was acquired by Adaptalift in July 2009. The AAL Hyster national network covers Forklift fleet management, Forklift driver training and Casual Forklift rentals.

Issues:
As the business has grown so too has the challenge of planning, despatching and monitoring the service teams that AAL Hyster has on the road. Although the business had grown dramatically it had remained manual in it's "job" related processes. Jobs were despatched to service teams via telephone or dedicated 2-way radios and when jobs were closed they were written up via manual paperwork. Overall the system was time inefficient for all areas of the business and did not allow for accurate control of the team in the field.

Solution: To combat the issues faced by the AAL Hyster service team, they have developed and introduced "ForkTrack", an advanced forklift fleet management system on Motorola MC75 terminals supplied by SATO. The main features of the system include full visibility of the field service team with the ability for real time reporting and complete monitoring of team members performance. The web based system has fully integrated into the service supply chain enabling real-time data and voice communication with the field service team, graphical service board functions for managers and controllers as well as many other functions.

Benefits:
The combined benefit of the new software and portable computing devices has been to provide improved fleet efficiencies, advanced safety features and and the ability to provide the most efficient service to their customers.